Ghoulish!

If you already thought Mayoral hopeful Fernando Ferrer was a bad guy for lying about sending his kids to public school, you might not want to hear that he was the only one of the four major Mayoral candidates to campaign yesterday, the fourth anniversary of Sept. 11, as the Post breathlessly reports:

Fernando Ferrer was ripped by families of 9/11 victims and others yesterday when he broke from tradition — by becoming the only mayoral candidate to campaign on the somber fourth anniversary of the terror attacks.

On a day when the other candidates declined to talk about politics out of respect for those killed on Sept. 11, 2001, the Democratic primary front-runner not only publicly met with the Rev. Al Sharpton to crow about winning his endorsement, but blatantly criticized main foe Anthony Weiner.

With a media horde in tow, Ferrer and Sharpton appeared together at the popular Amy Ruth’s restaurant in Harlem to discuss the minister’s 11th-hour endorsement of Ferrer. The primary election is tomorrow.

But critics — including incensed relatives of 9/11 victims — blasted the politicking as disgraceful on a day when the nation honored the 3,000 people killed on 9/11.

(Of course, there’s always the chance that the Reverend Sharpton was helping the other candidates . . .)

For his part, Ferrer responded by noting that he was eating dinner with two relatives of 9/11 victims:

Ferrer all but admitted the awkward situation in accepting Sharpton’s backing yesterday.

“I’m extremely pleased getting Rev. Sharpton’s endorsement and help. But this is not a day to talk about campaigns and tactics. It’s a day to remember what the city endured four years ago,” he said.

Sharpton said he and Ferrer were not ignoring the tragedy.

He noted that two of the young people who dined with them lost parents on 9/11, and other events they attended yesterday were in memory of the attacks.

Ferrer then went on to attack Anthony Weiner, his closest competitor, for the Congressman’s vote on the Iraq War. Weiner, who while not campaigning at a Harlem church, refused to respond to Ferrer’s comments, instead affirming that even though Sept. 11 is two days from the primary, there is something sacred about the date:

“This is Sept 11. If there is one day on the calendar that we can suspend politics, it should be today,” said Weiner, who attended a church in Harlem. “I don’t think it’s a day for politics.”

Although I’m sure the churchgoers he met on Sunday appreciate anyone praying with them, they may or may not realize that Weiner is Jewish and they may or may not have perceived his visit as campaigning. I’m just saying, is all.

How The Hurricane Hurts

No kidding, an entire Sunday Styles piece on women named Katrina and how the hurricane has affected their lives. Best catch, however, is the quote from Katrina of “Katrina and the Waves” fame:

Katrina Leskanich, the former lead singer of Katrina and the Waves, who lives in London, said that when her Web site began getting thousands of hits – more than 22,000 on Aug. 29, the day the hurricane hit New Orleans – she thought it was because her new solo song was getting airplay on BBC radio.

Now she’s glad that because of a decision made a month before the storm, her new album’s release has been delayed from Sept. 5 to October. “It would have looked like the most tasteless exercise in self-promotion.”

She said she hopes her band’s 1985 hit “Walking on Sunshine” might eventually become an anthem for New Orleans recovery.

When It Doubt, Use It As A Cooler

The Times profiles those jack-booted thugs who pick through your trash to determine whether you’re recycling correctly:

It was not yet sunrise in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, when Sgt. Christine Pascall pounded on the darkened front door of the three-story house on 47th Street.

A middle-aged woman wearing nothing but a bath towel stumbled to the door and opened it.

“Shoes are not recyclable,” Sergeant Pascall informed her.

The woman’s puzzlement quickly turned to annoyance as the sergeant, a member of the Department of Sanitation’s enforcement division, explained that she had found other unacceptable items in the blue recycling bag: Chinese food containers with rancid stripes of fried rice, and plastic foam meat trays and egg cartons.

The woman, who spoke little English, abruptly closed the door, refusing to reopen it. Sergeant Pascall finished writing a summons for mixing garbage with recycling, an environmental offense in a city where nearly all household trash has to be exported out of state at great expense. Then she taped a pink carbon copy of the $25 summons to the homeowner’s door.

The City collects $250,000 a year this way. But we digress:

After a year on the recycling beat, Sergeant Pascall has developed a keen eye, and when she sees a multifamily house with just one black plastic bag on the curb, she stops.

“My antennae are going up,” she said. “It’s recycling day and they don’t have anything out.”

She untied the black bag and found water jugs mixed with plastic hangars, a dirty aluminum tray and a bag of household garbage.

Another summons.

As the morning wore on, some residents stood alongside their recycling like students at a science fair waiting to be judged.

“This is a good effort,” Sergeant Pascall told Phillip Simpson, who towered over her.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Mr. Simpson said.

When she got to John Garcia’s house, though, he was scowling. “They give out tickets even though they are constantly changing the rules,” he said. “That’s a real pain.”

The sergeant inspected his recycling, rejecting metal salad tongs and a lasagna pan still specked with food. (No tongs, and the pan can be recycled only if clean.)

But sometimes the rules are too elusive even for her.

“What about this?” Mr. Garcia asked, holding up a bag of old cooking pots.

“Garbage,” she said.

“I thought any metal at all could go,” Mr. Garcia said, shaking his head.

He was right. The Sanitation Department chart says that old pots can be recycled.

But any confusion over metal is nothing compared with the misinformation about plastic. Sergeant Pascall finds unacceptable plastic in almost every bag.

“We don’t recycle Kitty Litter boxes,” she said as she poked through Felicita Jurado’s neatly bagged recycling.

“But this is plastic,” said Mrs. Jurado, wrapped in a flowered house coat and pink flowered sandals. “They say plastic recycles, so I put it in the plastics.”

“You have to look at the pictures,” Sergeant Pascall said, referring to the city’s recycling decal, which indeed does not picture cat litter.

Flustered, Mrs. Jurado removed a plastic bin the size of a picnic basket that had once held several pounds of cat litter. As she did so, John Tracey, a neighbor, walked by.

“It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” he said, commiserating.

Then, pointing to the cat litter box, he asked Mrs. Jurado, “Are you going to use that?”

She said no and he took it happily, planning to recycle it in an old-fashioned, unofficial way dictated by necessity, not law.

“I’ll use it as a cooler,” he said.

But What A Train Station!

On the eve of the anniversary of Sept. 11, a distressed Nicolai Ouroussoff writes in the Times that the only exciting thing planned at Ground Zero is a train station:

There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at ground zero looks bleaker than ever. A rebuilding effort that was originally cast as a symbolic rising from the ashes has long since turned into a hallucinogenic nightmare: a roller coaster ride of grief, naïveté, recriminations, political jockeying and paranoia.

The Freedom Tower, promoted as an image of the city’s resurrection, has been transformed into a stern fortress — a symbol of a city still in the grip of fear. The World Trade Center memorial has been enveloped by a clutter of memorabilia.

. . .

On this anniversary weekend, it may be time to face up to what few have wanted to acknowledge: that nothing of value can be built at ground zero while the anguish and anxiety remain so fresh – nor while political and economic forces are eager to exploit those emotions.

I was once unwilling to recognize this. Three years ago, when the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was opening its competition for the design of a master plan for ground zero, I paid a call on an older architect who had spent a lifetime navigating the byzantine planning politics of American cities. At the time, New York was full of anxious hope. A public outcry over the dull uniformity of the original renderings by the architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle had sent the development corporation back to the drawing boards, and there was a sense that something bold and important might happen.

The architect, unimpressed, said flatly that the only ground zero project that was not doomed to failure was the transportation hub. Since it was devoid of symbolic importance, he explained, it would not become a political time bomb. The rest? Forget it.

I refused to believe him.

Obviously, his view was prophetic. The only promising design so far is the soaring glass hall of Santiago Calatrava’s train station, which may end up as one of the most glorious public spaces to rise in New York since the construction of Grand Central Terminal. By contrast, the rest of Daniel Libeskind’s master plan looks eerily like those original Beyer Blinder Belle proposals – though with more elaborate packaging – a somber memorial to the dead, neatly parceled off from a sea of corporate towers that could be anywhere.

Cyclone Coverup!

The Post reports that Coney Island’s Cyclone had an accident and the family operating the landmarked rollercoaster have covered it up:

A terrifying accident that injured four riders on Coney Island’s world famous Cyclone was the real reason the roller coaster was knocked out of commission, it was revealed yesterday, not the routine maintenance the ride’s operators initially reported.

The 78-year-old coaster screeched to a dead halt during its first death-defying 85-foot drop last Saturday night when the three-car train struck a “misaligned track” at 60 mph, sending four people to the hospital with whiplash and forcing it to be shut down by the city, said Buildings Department spokeswoman Jennifer Givner.

That’s a far cry from Astroland Park manager Mark Blumenthal’s claim after the accident that the ride was shut down — midway through Labor Day weekend — for basic repairs caused by heavy usage over a busy summer season.

What really happened was every Cyclone’s riders’ worst nightmare come true, said one person who claimed, in an anonymous posting on the Web site Craigslist, to have been aboard the ride from hell that night.

“The steel track snapped, the front wheels came off the first car, sparks were flying on the wooden track,” the posting read. “Several safety bars were no longer locked in when we finally stopped, others had to be broken out of their cars.

“The broken steel track on exiting looked like three folded Z’s stacked on top of each other. The wood underneath it had snapped in several places.”

When pressed for comment, Astroland spokesman Joseph Carella admitted an accident had taken place, but said it was far less severe than the Web posting described and insisted the ride is very safe.

“It’s an old lady, and it requires a lot of maintenance, and the care that they put into this is extraordinary,” he said.

Why news of an accident at one of the city’s most well known landmarks would take a week to come to light was not immediately clear.

But Carella said the fact that the Albert family — which has run the ride since 1975 — was in the process of rebidding for the city contract to manage it had nothing to do with it.

“They made all the proper reports,” Carella said. “These people aren’t foolish enough to think that when you have such a visible attraction that this wouldn’t come out.”

Bridge and Tunnel Club was on the scene that Sunday, and thought it strange that the ride was not operating on a busy Labor Day weekend with only a hastily written sign announcing the closing. Little did anyone know . . .